The
Los
Angeles Times has
revealed some shocking news -- the iconic Hello Kitty character isn't
a cat! In an article Tuesday (August 26th), theTimes cited
University of Hawaii anthropologist Christine R. Yano, who's spent
years studying the Hello Kitty phenomenon and wrote a book about it,
called Pink
Globalization: Hello Kitty's Trek Across the Pacific,
for the surprising news. Yano says that when she was preparing text
for an upcoming Hello Kitty exhibit for the Japanese American Museum
in Los Angeles she was corrected, quote, "very firmly" when
she described the character as a cat. She said, "Hello Kitty is
not a cat. She's a cartoon character. She is a little girl. . . .
She's never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a
two-legged creature. She does have a pet cat of her own, however, and
it's called Charmmy Kitty." Hello Kitty is actually a British
third-grader named Kitty White, who is described as a Scorpio with a
twin sister who loves apple pie. Yano explains that when Hello Kitty
debuted in Japan in the 1970s, the Japanese and Japanese women in
particular were very much into Britain.